


In the Eye of a Hurricane

by Sohotthateveryonedied



Series: Whumptober 2020 [17]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics), Robin (Comics)
Genre: Adultery, Angst, Bad Parents Jack and Janet Drake, Canonical Character Death, Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Conspiracy, Gen, Jack Drake Being Jack Drake, Mystery, Prompt: Dirty Secret, Whumptober 2020, love that that's a tag, tim isn't jack's biological child wow he's so lucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:33:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27070528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sohotthateveryonedied/pseuds/Sohotthateveryonedied
Summary: He can hear his mom’s voice as he reads the letter, recognizes her handwriting in all its fancy loops and swirls. She tells Jack in the letter that she has been hiding a secret from him for years and doesn’t have the guts to tell him in person. Tim skims, tries to pick apart his mom’s long-winded explanations about living in fear of being found out, of the shame that followed her every day.Tim can’t evenbeginto guess what she could be talking about until finally he sees it, clear as day in black ink.Timothy isn’t your son.
Relationships: Jack Drake & Janet Drake & Tim Drake, Jack Drake & Tim Drake, Tim Drake & Bruce Wayne
Series: Whumptober 2020 [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948297
Comments: 19
Kudos: 513





	In the Eye of a Hurricane

**Author's Note:**

> Whump Day 17: "Dirty Secret"
> 
> Guess who spent all day making a fic way longer than it needed to be instead of starting an essay that's due tomorrow? THIS GAL! Anyway Julie and I have talked about this idea a lot so of course I needed to write it out to get it out of my system, no surprise there. I doubt I'll ever continue with this AU, so please don't ask me how Bruce finds out or how this ends because I have no idea and I don't plan to anytime soon.
> 
> Title is from "Hurricane" from Hamilton!

Mom is dead. Dad is in a coma. Bruce is...here.  
  
Tim is still getting used to the idea of a parental figure sticking with him for longer than a few weeks at a time. He keeps waiting for Bruce to turn a corner and disappear without a trace like he should, but it never happens. He stays by Tim’s side, offering support that Tim wasn’t even aware could be offered. It’s different, but it’s a good different.  
  
Tim only wishes that could be enough to wash away the grief. He takes it one day at a time, bit by bit, if only to keep himself from looking too far ahead and seeing the sea of loneliness waiting for him in the case that his dad never wakes up. Today he dedicates himself to handling his parents’ finances, sifting through the mess they left in the hands of their thirteen-year-old son.  
  
It’s eerie being in his dad’s office now, like he’s entering a tomb. Tim is searching for his parents’ insurance documents so he can get that dealt with and out of the way, then move on to the next project. Whatever takes his mind off of it all. It’s hard enough seeing his dad lying in that hospital bed every day, looking dead but not quite getting there yet.  
  
Tim opens the next filing cabinet, grabbing another stack of files and opening the first folder, only for an envelope to fall out. It’s not like the others, otherwise Tim would have put it back and disregarded it altogether. But this one is not a clean white envelope you would find in any office. This one is made of thick paper, yellowing at the edges with swirl patterns on the flap.  
  
_Jack, don’t open this until I’m dead,_ it says in Tim’s mother’s handwriting.  
  
Dad clearly didn’t obey orders (what else is new?) because the envelope has already been torn open. It’s crumpled at the corners, creased in places it shouldn’t be, as if Dad was angry when he stuffed the contents back into the envelope and locked it away in this cabinet.  
  
Tim’s first instinct is to read it. After all, Janet Drake is dead. She’s not here to scold Tim for going through what isn’t his, but that is precisely what stops him from opening the letter. This is from his mother—his mother who is now dead. And his dad is in a coma. Poking into their business...it feels wrong. No matter how curious Tim is, he can’t desecrate this letter.  
  
So he tucks the envelope into his pocket, careful not to wrinkle it. He can’t even _begin_ to imagine what the letter must be about, but that isn’t very surprising. Despite being their son, Tim didn’t know Janet and Jack Drake any better than he’d know a gym coach or one of the housekeepers. He knew everything about their company and their lifestyles, but he never got more than a glimpse into who they truly were. Not until it was too late.  
  
The closest Tim would ever get to bonding with his parents were the rare nights on which Mom and Dad would sit with Tim on the sofa, watching Pixar movies until he fell asleep. Those were his favorite memories of his parents: his dad calling him “champ” and talking endlessly about the movies’ animation styles, Mom with her hair down and her makeup washed off, for once not caring about her appearance.  
  
Tim doesn’t know what the letter could possibly be about, but curiosity is a persistent thing.  
  
Days click by, switching off into nights in an endless cycle. Dad doesn’t wake from the coma. Tim isn’t sure if he ever will. Dick and Bruce hover around him like house flies, waiting for some kind of ball to drop. Maybe for Tim to break down, to cry, to mourn the ending of his world. Instead, all Tim can do is wonder about the letter.  
  
If it was so important, Tim would already know whatever it was, right? Maybe it’s a copy of his mom’s will. Maybe it’s a map to a collection of buried treasure that she never told anyone about. Maybe it’s a confession that she was secretly a supervillain and all of those trips she and Dad took were actually with the intention to rob every bank across the eastern seaboard.  
  
Tim keeps the letter buried under piles of school papers in his desk drawer, but it might as well be sending out a signal to him every minute, reminding him of its presence. He falls asleep night after night in his temporary room at the manor, listening to the letter rattle around in its drawer like a tell-tale heart.  
  
What does it say? What secret was his mother hiding? Is it about Tim? Is it about her past? Will it unlock some family conspiracy?  
  
Tim makes it almost a month resisting the siren’s call before he can’t take it any longer. He climbs out of bed one night, the floor cold on his bare feet. He grabs the letter from its hiding place and jumps back into bed where the shadows’ tendrils can’t reach. He pulls his blanket over his head, a shiver running down his spine as he clicks on his flashlight and sets the beam on the letter. He can feel the walls watching him, witnessing this desecration of his dead mother’s written crypt. These are the last words he will ever get from her.  
  
Tim opens the letter. He recognizes his mother’s stationery, the flower patterns at the top. Back when he was younger, Tim used to spin around in his mom’s desk chair and ask why she had special paper with her name on it.  
  
_“Because important people like to stand out in their letters,”_ she’d say.  
  
_“Why can’t you just use regular paper?”_ _  
_ _  
_ _“Because regular paper doesn’t have your name at the top. You can’t feel official if you’re not using official stationery.”_  
  
Tim thought about that as he spun. _“You can if you write it in yourself. All you need is some crayons.”_  
  
His mom chuckled and ruffled his hair. _“I suppose you could do that too.”_  
  
He can hear his mom’s voice as he reads the letter, recognizes her handwriting in all its fancy loops and swirls. She tells Jack in the letter that she has been hiding a secret from him for years and doesn’t have the guts to tell him in person. Tim skims, tries to pick apart his mom’s long-winded explanations about living in fear of being found out, of the shame that followed her every day.  
  
Tim can’t even _begin_ to guess what she could be talking about until finally he sees it, clear as day in black ink.  
  
_Timothy isn’t your son._  
  
He stops. Rereads the sentence.  
  
Then again.  
  
And again, trying to tempt the words into making some sort of sense. Tim doesn’t know how long he spends staring at those four words, his eyes glazed, before he tentatively starts reading again. Janet talks about how guilty she feels for not confessing this earlier, how she doesn’t want Tim to find out, how sorry she is that Tim isn’t the son Jack wanted him to be. That she disappointed him by giving him Tim instead of the “correct” child.  
  
Tim is going to be sick. He throws off the blanket and goes to the gas fireplace across the room, turning it on. He crumples up the letter and throws it in without a second’s hesitation. He watches it catch fire, the flames blackening the corners as they eat away at the letter until it’s no more than ash.  
  
This can’t be real, he tells himself. It can’t be. His dad…  
  
He knew. Dad knew all this time. They both did. Tim has been walking around, thinking he knew exactly who he was and where he came from. Writing his dad’s name on school forms and calling himself Tim Drake when he’s not even a _Drake._ Not biologically.  
  
How could they _hide_ this from him? Did it never occur to them that Tim should _know_ this kind of vital information? That it might literally reconfigure his entire _life?_  
  
Tim sits there on the rug, staring at the fireplace as the walls crumble around him. He can’t believe they kept this from him. Who doesn’t tell their own son that his genetics aren’t what he thinks they are? That somewhere in the world, there is a person walking around who has no idea he’s got a son somewhere. He probably doesn’t even know that Tim _exists._  
  
The more Tim thinks about it though, the more it makes an odd sort of sense. His parents have always been distant, always treated Tim like they expected something different every time they looked at him. Like he was so entirely Other that they couldn’t help but be disappointed, no matter what he did or how hard he tried to get them to love him the way other kids’ parents did.  
  
He wonders when Jack found the letter. Was it given to him with instructions, or did he stumble upon it one day in Janet’s office? Did he confront her right away, or did he wait a while? Tim thinks back to three years ago when their marriage took its first sudden dip, as if they hit a wall out of nowhere.  
  
Could this have been the cause all along?  
  
Three years since the secret came out. Three years of arguments bordered by stony silences, flipping back and forth between moods whenever they weren’t on yet another long trip, trying to salvage a failing marriage. Tim used to assume it was his fault that his parents were never home—maybe there was something wrong with him that they didn’t want to see. Now it all makes sense.  
  
Jack has never acted like much of a father to Tim in the first place, as if he’s subconsciously known all along that there was something dividing him from his son. Because there _was_ something dividing them, something deep in their DNA.  
  
Which, of course, begs the question: If Jack isn’t Tim’s father, who is? Parts of the letter were ripped, the ink smudged in places from what must have been scars of Jack’s anger at finding out his family was built on a lie. If Janet did divulge who Tim’s biological father is, Tim couldn’t find it in the letter.  
  
There are only two people in the world who can give Tim the answers he needs, and one of them is dead. The other one is close behind. He’s stuck in limbo.  
  
The days after the revelation pass in a haze. A haze of astonishment, silent questions, answers he needs but may never get. Tim keeps waiting for the universe to shift, because he just found out information that changes everything he thought was true about himself. He should be _feeling_ something, right?  
  
Maybe it’s because he and his dad never had a real relationship anyway, so there’s nothing to mourn. There’s no deciding moment of _what does this change?_ because there's nothing _to_ change. He and Jack have been living separate lives for a long time now. This revelation just cements something Tim has known for years.  
  
He never had a father before. Why should it change anything that he still doesn’t have one now?  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Dad wakes up from the coma. Tim buried his mother alone, and now the only parent he still has is back, but he’s not even Tim’s real parent. Not technically, at least.  
  
Tim considers asking about it. About the atoms of a letter lying in a pile of soot in his fireplace at the manor. But his dad is sick. He can’t move his legs, can barely breathe, and now he has a dead wife to mourn on top of it all. Tim can’t bring it up now.  
  
As it turns out, there is no right time to bring it up. Months pass, _years,_ each without the avalanche hitting. The truth stays bottled up inside of Tim, yearning to break out and nuke something. But Tim holds it back, keeps himself from taking that step, from bringing the secret out into the open.  
  
Until one argument over _curfew_ of all things breaks the seal. Dana is with a late client tonight and Tim is wiped out from two sleepless nights in a row thanks to an endless case Robin has been tailing. Tim came home from Ives’ house thirty minutes late, and Jack must have been drinking because he tears Tim a new one over “integrity” and “respecting your father.”  
  
Maybe Tim’s exhaustion has caught up to him. Maybe he’s just sick of lying. Whatever the cause, the bottle inside of him breaks and the words come flooding out. “Respect my _father?_ What’s there to respect? You’re not even my real father!”  
  
Jack’s eyes widen. He staggers back as if Tim slapped him. “What?”  
  
“You heard me.”  
  
“Who told you?”  
  
“Nobody had to tell me. I’m a better detective than you think I am. How long did you think you could keep the truth from me? Years? Decades?”  
  
“How did you find out?” Dodging the question. Any investigator worth their salt would see that as a confession, and Tim is better than all of them.  
  
“I found the letter,” he says. “The one Mom wrote you.”  
  
“You went through my things?”  
  
Tim could laugh if he weren’t so outraged. “Of _course_ that’s what you’re worried about. Do you even realize how much you hid from me? This is my _life,_ and you decided to keep it a secret from me.”  
  
“We wanted to wait until you could handle it.”  
  
“Until I could _handle it?_ I’m not five years old, Dad. If you actually bothered to pay attention, you’d see that I can handle myself just fine without you. I don’t need you sneaking around, trying to keep me in the dark about my own life. I deserve better than that. I deserve _better_ than to be treated like a child.”  
  
Jack slams his hand on the table, loud enough to make Tim flinch. “What was I supposed to do, Tim? Huh? Was I supposed to just _tell_ you that I was on a business trip for barely a _week_ before your whore mother went running to Bruce Wayne, of all people—”  
  
Tim chokes. _“Bruce?_ What the hell are you talking about?”  
  
“Like you didn’t already know. You spend your days galivanting around with Wayne, spending all of your time with him and his butler as if they’re your real family. They didn’t do _shit._ I was the one who raised you, fed you, gave you everything you wanted. I have been a better father to you than Bruce Wayne will _ever_ be.”  
  
If Tim hadn’t been struck by a battering ram, he would have debated that. He would have brought up the fact that at least Bruce _cares._ At least Bruce treats Tim like he’s someone who matters. “Does—does Bruce know?”  
  
Jack snorts. “I doubt it. She never told him, and I sure as hell don’t plan to. I’ll bet he doesn’t even remember his night with your mother.” Revulsion washes over Tim at the thought. God, Bruce fucked Tim’s _mom._ Bruce...  
  
Bruce is Tim’s father. Holy shit.  
  
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Tim’s voice shakes. “Were you just planning on letting me go my entire life without knowing who my real father was?”  
  
“Does it matter?”  
  
“Of course it matters! You and Mom hid this from me for _years,_ and for what? For your pride?”  
  
“We were trying to protect you.”  
  
_“Don’t_ say that,” Tim snaps. “You and I both know it wasn’t about that. You wanted to protect your reputation. You would rather lie to my face every day than have all of Gotham calling you a cuckold.”  
  
Jack just looks at him, unapologetic. Bored, even. “Can you blame me?”  
  
Tim wants to hit something. A wall, maybe. He wants to go on patrol and fight until his knuckles bleed. “You should have told me. You should have told me the day you found out.”  
  
“Would it have changed anything? I’m your father, no matter what some DNA test says.”  
  
“Then why haven’t you _acted_ like my father? Why haven’t you _tried?”_ There are tears beading at the corners of Tim’s eyes now, but he ignores the sting. “Fathers are there for you. They don’t go running around the world every chance they get, leaving their kid at home to wonder why he can’t get his parents to love him. Fathers don’t promise to start caring more and then forget the next day. Bruce has been more of a father to me than you _ever_ were, and he didn’t even need a claim on me to do it.”  
  
That must be the final straw, because Tim can’t remember the last time he saw his dad this angry. “Go to your room. _Now.”_  
  
Tim swallows the lump in his throat. “Sure. Just send me to my room when you don’t feel like dealing with me. It’s nice to see nothing has changed.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Six months later, Jack Drake is murdered by Captain Boomerang.  
  
His only crime was being Tim’s father, biological or not. There are so many things that Tim should have done differently before the end. He should have worked harder to mend the bond between him and Jack. He should have stayed retired from Robin like his dad wanted, but he didn’t. And now Tim’s dad is dead.  
  
It’s why he turns Bruce down when he offers to adopt Tim afterwards. It’s too soon after the loss of his dad, and _definitely_ too soon to let another father figure into his life. It’s also why Tim hasn’t told Bruce what he knows yet, that it wouldn’t even have to be adoption. That Bruce has had a son living right next door for years and didn’t even know it.  
  
Jack wasn’t Tim’s biological father. He was barely a father at all, but he _tried._ He tried to be better for Tim, even when he didn’t have to. Even when he could have washed his hands of Tim altogether, gone on to start a new life with Dana without someone else’s son weighing him down. But he stayed. He stayed and he tried and he got murdered for it.  
  
So Tim makes up an uncle. He takes some time to live on his own and figure out who Tim Drake is without a parental figure trying to shape his life for him. He grieves his dad the way he deserves—grieves him like any son should mourn his father, genetics be damned. It doesn’t ease the ache at all, but it does allow for some peace. He figures that’s as good as he can expect it to get.  
  
The second time Bruce asks to adopt Tim, months later, Tim accepts. Not because he’s forgotten his dad. He doesn’t think he could _ever_ forget his father, the things he did for Tim and the things he didn’t do. The fact that he would still be alive today if it weren’t for Tim. But Tim is tied to Bruce, whether he chooses to tell Bruce how deeply they are entwined or not.  
  
And he will one day. Just...not yet. But soon.  
  
Tim is now moving his things out of the stable house and into his own bedroom at the manor. A _permanent_ one this time. No transience, no lies. Tim is putting his things into the drawers of his new desk, dumping in his supplies in a neatly disorganized manner when he finds a pad of stationery he forgot he even had. It’s a gift that Alfred got for him one birthday, something he said every young man should have.  
  
Tim looks at the name— _his_ name—across the top of the first sheet, printed with an officiality that no sixteen-year-old needs. After a moment he grabs a pen and adds an extra word at the end, then pulls back to look at his work.  
  
_Timothy Drake-Wayne._  
  
Much better.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> (For the record, yeah Bruce got drunk once and accidentally slept with Janet Drake but had no memory of it and definitely wouldn't have done it if he were in his right mind LOOK THE PLOT NEEDED IT TO HAPPEN OKAY)
> 
> [Feel free to mosey on down to my Tumblr!](http://sohotthateveryonedied.tumblr.com/)


End file.
